Hi-tech snag for bereaved

Bereaved families have been left distraught, after a state-of-the-art computers system - brought in at Staffordshire County Council to introduce on-line registration - repeatedly crashed.

The authority has now abandoned the system after it "rapidly became apparent" that it was unable to cope with the volume of work.

Officers at the council said they could not confirm how much the system cost to install or give details of the overtime costs involved in manually inputting all the lost data.

Registration Online (RON) was brought in to make the registration of births, marriages and deaths easier to manage, yet within two weeks of its introduction on March 26 this year the bereaved were becoming upset and other users frustrated, as registration times doubled.

A report by Councillor Susan Woodward, cabinet member for healthier communities and older people, said: "During the two-week implementation phase, birth and death registrations were taking 100 per cent longer to register and the system kept crashing, causing distress to death informants and general inconvenience to all customers".

Following the disastrous launch the GRO has been forced to revert to manual registrations once again in Staffordshire, leaving workers at registry offices across the county working evenings and weekends in a bid to deal with all the extra information.